


Principles

by seeminglyincurablesentimentality (myinnerchildisbored)



Series: Rose Shelby vs. All the Bastards [5]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 12:18:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myinnerchildisbored/pseuds/seeminglyincurablesentimentality
Summary: Birmingham, 1939. Britain is about to join the war and all the Shelbys are determined to do their part in one way or another.





	Principles

**Author's Note:**

> Right. So. Obviously this is something of a leap forward, but it was one of those bits that refused to wait its turn. So here it is. It's 1939, so Charlie's 17and Rose is 24. And Tommy's probably getting a bit to old for any of this.

_28 th July 1939 _  

The Shelby household had seen its fair share of disagreements over the years, to put it mildly. A solid percentage of them had been what one might have described as heated, quite some of them had turned what one might consider violent; but nothing, _nothing_ , compared to this.

“You-“ Rose had both her hands planted flat on the table, her face two inches from her father’s at most, “- you’re not seriously encouraging this?”

“I don’t need-“ Charlie started from the safety of the table’s far end, where he was attempting to soothe his rapidly swelling left eye with a napkin dipped in whiskey.

“Shut up,” Rose roared over her shoulder, “unless you want another one!”

“Rosie…” her father said wearily, drawing her full attention and the entirety of her fury back to himself.

“Tell him he’s not going,” Rose demanded. “He’s not fucking allowed. Tell him now.”

“It’s not my decision,” Tommy said.

“Like fuck it is not!” Rose banged her palms on the table with every syllable. “Everything’s your decision - no one in this family gets to do a fucking thing without your approval.”

“When duty calls-“ her father started.

“He fucking volunteered,” Rose shouted in his face. “The fucking BEF* isn’t banging on his door demanding his services, he offered himself up like a bloody idiot!”

“I want to make a fuckin’ difference,” Charlie protested, getting to his feet now but still keeping the table between his sister and himself. She’d punched him in the eye before he’d even properly finished his announcement a couple of minutes ago and there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t do it again. “I want to help, Rosie…”

“Oh, grow up, Charles,” Rose snapped, throwing her hands up and staring him down. “Your presence going to make fuck all difference, unless you end up personally shooting Herr Hitler stone-cold dead and – no offense now, brother – that’s not bloody likely.”

“Are you finished?” Her father was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed, hands folded atop his knee, like he was watching some idiotic idealist blowing a gasket in a parliamentary debate.

“No, I’m not finished, thank you.” Rose glared at him. “I’ll be finished when this one-“ she pointed her finger at her brother as though it was a gun “-gets his head out of his arse.”

“Your brother,” Tommy said quietly, “has signed the papers. That’s all there is to it.”

“So. Make. A. Phone. Call,” Rose pressed the words from between gritted teeth.

“I’ll do no such thing.” Her father held her glare without a blinking. “Our Charlie’s his own man.”

“He’s seventeen years of age,” Rose exploded anew. “He’s not any sort of man, not his own or anyone else’s either, and if you don’t put a stop to this now, he’ll never get a chance to be.”

“ _We_ made it back,” her father said.

“Is that what you call it?” Rose noted the slight narrowing of his eyes with great satisfaction.

“Don’t start in on matters you don’t understand,” Tommy said in that politician tone of voice Rose hated more than anything. “You were a child, you didn’t know what was happening.”

“I knew enough to clock that you had to get off your chops on tar to work up the nerve to close your eyes at night,” Rose hissed. “D’you want that for him? Or to come back like Danny fucking Whizzbang or Archie Parsons? Tell him no.”

Her father took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t be naïve, Rose,” he said. “He’d be called up in a matter of months and then he’d have to go regardless, just like everyone else.”

“Karl’s not going,” Rose shot back.

“Fuckin’ Karl’s in jail,” Charlie groaned. “For fuckin’ treason or-“

“I told you to shut up!”

Rose made her way round the table quicker than her brother could retreat, shoving him into the chest with one hand, slapping him with the other. He was half-a-head taller than her now, but it wasn’t doing him any favours.

“And Karl’s not in for treason, you thick fuck. It’s a qualifying sentence, Charles, and at the end of it he’ll either spend the war at a desk or not having to serve at all.” She had Charlie with his back against the window now. “But either way, Karl’s not going to have his balls blown to shite somewhere in fucking Germany or Poland or wherever the fuck else.”

“ ‘cause he’s a coward!” Charlie shouted, his arms up protecting his face from her onslaught.

“He’s a conscientious objector,” Rose yelled over him. “Which means he’s put a bit more thought into his position on this matter than just going for the Boys’ Own Adventure propaganda that’s got you all hard and ready for action.”

“Enough,” her father said quietly.

“And you’d not even have to go before any bloody tribunal,” Rose went on, gripping her brother’s wrists and pulling his hands down so she could see his face. “You know this, Charles. So, since he-“ she jerked her head back in their father’s direction “-won’t pick up the fucking phone without your say so, you better tell him right this minute to get you off.”

“I’m not-“

Rose let go off Charlie’s hands and whacked him upside the head as hard as she could.

“Now!”

“Enough!”

Tommy, no longer in his chair, banged the table sharply to make sure he had their attention. He pointed at Rose.

“Come here.”

She obliged gladly, with three long strides, her entire bearing daring him to challenge her.

“Listen to me,” her father said, “and try to get it through your thick head: I’m not getting him off, even if he begs me on his knees. Leave it alone, Rose.”

She slapped him.

Everything stilled. It was almost like the thing that happened when a headless chicken caught up to the fact that it was no more and stopped running. Rose turned and walked around the table. She took her bag from a chair, pulled out a large envelope and tossed it on the table.

“We need more busses,” she announced. “And more ration books. Have your people call mine.”

She didn’t feel the need to slam the door behind her, it didn’t seem necessary.

 #

_1 st August 1939_

Rose came home very late, laden with paperwork and no hope of sleep for weeks. She fumbled for her keys, only to find the door unlocked.

“Out,” she told her father before she’d even put her boxes down.

He leaned back in the rickety chair and tapped his fingers on Rose’s kitchen table.

“How’s work?” he asked.

“I’ve provided you with all the appropriate forms and statistics,” Rose said. “And if you’d have bothered to glance at them-“

“I have,” Tommy interrupted quietly. “They’re being processed as we speak and the necessary arrangements will be made within 48 hours.”

The weight that rolled off Rose’s shoulders was so tremendous that she couldn’t hold back an audible sigh of relief. She leaned against the sink and felt her shoulders relax for what seemed like the first time in months.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Rosie.”

“Drink?”

“If I may.”

Rose retrieved a bottle of whiskey and water glasses from the cabinet and joined her father at the table. She poured them a measure each and they sipped in silence.

“You look tired,” Tommy said.

Rose shrugged.

“How’d you know I’d be home?” she asked.

“Took a chance.”

“Even though the odds were stacked?”

“Lucky me,” Tommy said drily.

Rose laughed without particular conviction, put down her glass and rubbed her face with both hands.

“What’s on your mind?” her father asked.

“Where the fuck we’ll put close to a million people while the bloody NCC* drinks tea and waits for their building permits, for a start,” Rose said. “And that’s not counting babies, mums and cripples…that’s just the fucking school aged children.”

“D’you need anything else?”

“Time,” she said. “And patience.”

Tommy gave the tiniest hint of a smile.

“The next pig farmer that calls me ‘sweetheart’ and then tries to tell me he’s no room to take anyone even though he’s sitting pretty, smack-bang in a fucking reception zone, gets a bullet, I’m not joking.” Rose shook her head. “It’s ridiculous.”

“If it’s any consolation, Lizzie’s ready to put you up for sainthood.” Her father refilled their glasses. “Says I should hire you to do negotiating for me.”

“I think I’ll stick to my own job, if it’s all the same to you.”

“You’re decent enough at it, sounds like.”

During her travels up and down the country side, recruiting landowners, farmers and anyone with any type of room at all to put up the hordes the Ministry of Health planned to evacuate when the inevitable happened, Rose had pulled off a minor miracle. The eighty children currently residing at Grace Shelby were going to be moved to a sprawling country estate way out in Sussex, all of them to the same place. Anyone presently working to look after them would go to, including Lizzie and their Ruby.

What Rose’s father didn’t know – and would never know, if Rose had anything to do with it – was that she’d rode the Lord of the manor senseless before informing him that she’d keep his wife in the dark only if he agreed to house her father’s charges indefinitely and with minimal subsidies.

So yes, she was decent enough at it, she supposed.

Their second round was down to dregs before Rose spoke again.

“There’s one more thing I need, come to think of it. D’you know what it is?”

“Yea, Rosie…” Tommy watched the last sip of whiskey swill around the glass “…I know. But I can’t.”

“You can.”

“Orright,” he conceded. “But I won’t.”

“Why?” Rose’s jaw was so tight suddenly she could barely get the word out.

“Because it’d be the wrong thing to do.”

“Would it fuck.” She didn’t raise her voice but there was a hardness in it that disturbed even herself. “You’ve the means to keep your own son from hell on earth and you’re just watching him go. It’s not going to matter to them if he goes, they don’t fucking need him…we do.”

“It does matter.”

“How?” Rose spat.

“When we went to France-“

“Oh, fucking spare me-“

“Shut up,” Tommy cut her off. “People like us – like me and your uncle Arthur and your uncle John – we’d no choice in the matter. It was always the fat fuckers with the coin and the connections that either got themselves off or their darling boys and that felt even more wrong than the bloody war itself. And now the shoe’s on the other foot and it still feels wrong.”

Rose stared at her father across the table.

“Are you honestly telling me you’ll let our Charlie die for your fucking principles?”

“Why d’you live here?” Her father’s eyes wandered around Rose’s unkempt kitchen, taking in the peeling paint and the dripping faucet.

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“If you’d ask me, I’d buy you a nice house out where it’s green,” he said. “With proper fucking chairs and a door that locks properly. And you could tend the garden and go to bed with the chickens, instead of working your hands to the bone finding safe havens for people you don’t even know.”

Rose looked at the empty glass between her hands.

“But you’re not asking me,” her father went on. “And we both know why you’re not asking me. Why you’re not taking advantage.”

For a heartbeat, Rose closed her eyes.

“You’re not taking advantage because that wouldn’t be fair. It’d be the sort of wrong that’d keep you up at night.”

Tommy got to his feet and picked up his hat and briefcase.

“It’ll be quick,” he said. “We’ll have him back in a couple of months.”

“You know,” Rose said, “that’s what we tell the mums, so they’ll let their kids evacuate. _You’ll have them back by Christmas._ Like fuck they will.”

“Hope dies last, eh?”

“Unless our Charlie doesn’t first,” she called after him as he left the flat.

#

_4 th September 1939_

The Arms was packed. Men were shouting their unstained uniforms one last good night out on the town before going off to drench them with blood, hopeful it wouldn’t be their own. They’d had their dinners at home with their weeping mothers and stiff-lipped fathers, they’d been told to take care and do everyone proud. Now all that was left to do was to get pissed, apparently.

Rose elbowed her way through the crowd, Charlie was at a table in the very centre of the action, holding court with some of his stupid little mates.

“Orright, Charles?”

Charlie looked up and a surprised smile crept across his face.

“I thought you were off saving the children,” he shouted over the din around them.

“I’m on my lunch break,” Rose shouted back. “D’you want to get a drink?”

Her brother cocked his head.

“My shout,” Rose offered.

“You’re on.”

Charlie followed her to the bar and, once Rose had procured a bottle and two glasses, allowed her to lead the way to a table in the very furthest corner of the place. It wasn’t exactly quiet but they could talk without shouting.

“How’d it go?” Charlie asked before he’d even taken a sip.

Rose downed her drink in one.

“Let’s just say that – after tonight – I’m sleeping for a week,” she said. “It went well. But it was one hectic weekend.”

It was now nine at night on a Monday and they’d been officially at war since Friday morning. In between then and now, roughly one-and-a-half million bloody people had been moved from where bombs were pretty much guaranteed to fall to places of little interest to anyone. Rose herself had seen to it that some twenty-thousand five-to-fifteen-year-olds got safely bussed out of Birmingham, orderly, notes pinned to their jackets, without jumping out of the bus windows back into their weeping mothers’ arms or falling out from the sheer excitement of getting to go somewhere new.

This morning, she’d driven out to Sussex with Lizzie, Ruby and two busloads of children to make sure they were received in style. One of the lads had dropped her outside the Arms on the way back in.

“How was dinner?” she asked.

“Orright,” Charlie shrugged. “Strange.”

“Did Pol keep it together?”

“Barely.” Charlie held out his glass and Rose refilled it.

“Are you shitting yourself yet?” she asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“If you’ve changed your mind-“

“Don’t fucking start again-“

“I’m only saying that if you have,” Rose insisted, “I can have a car out the front in five minutes and we’ll go and we’ll find Jimmy fucking Lee. I’ll take you meself, Charlie, I will.”

He looked at her and for a moment Rose’s heart soared with hope.

“They’ll be by the border,” she said. “I’ll be back before you’re even due on the train tomorrow.”

“Bein’ a deserter’s even worse than a fucking conchie,” Charlie said.

“What good’s your reputation going to do you when you’re fucking dead?”

“I’m not some war-shy gypsy bastard, like Jimmy Lee and his lot,” Charlie shouted. “And that’s the end of it, you hear me?”

“D’you hear yourself?” Rose shouted back. “You’re not like him, Charlie, you’ll not make it ten minutes before you realise you’re in way over your head and there’ll be no going back then.”

“I’m not a child, Rosie,” her brother slammed his glass on the table. “There’s lads almost two years younger than me-“

“I don’t give a fuck about those,” she interrupted, her voice cracking a little.

“Ah, Rosie…” Charlie puffed out his cheeks, exhaling slowly, looking all of ten years old. “I’ll be orright, eh?”

She refilled his glass in lieu of an answer and watched him knock it back in one without flinching.

“It’s definite then?” she asked.

“It is, yea.”

“Will we get pissed?” Rose made a valiant attempt at a smile. “And talk about the good old times? That’s what you’re s’posed to do, isn’t it?”

“Only if you swear to me you’ll leave well enough alone,” her brother said.

“I’ll not say another word about it, Charles,” she said. “Promise.”

#

Around closing time, one of the lads was lifted onto the bar and started singing _We’ll meet again_. By the time he got to the first _sunny day_ , the whole place was belting it out with him, including Rose and Charlie, who tried to remain upright with considerable difficulty now. Rose was propping him up, steering him towards the back exit, singing on the top of her lungs. She’d been nursing the same drink for so long, she was barely even tipsy anymore now.

“I’ma be sick,” Charlie slurred into her ear and she just managed to shove him out into the alley before he hurled his guts up against the garbage bins.

“There you go,” she said, patting his back with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other. “Better out than in, eh?”

Charlie staggered across the alley and sank down onto the ground, his back against the rough bricks of the wall. They were alone now, although the roaring from the crowd being ejected via the front door was growing steadily. Rose sat down next to her brother.

“Orright?”

“I’m fucked,” Charlie groaned.

“I’ve a present for you.”

Rose dug deep into her bag. It took her brother an age to focus his glazed eyes enough in the half-dark to realise what she was holding.

“Huh…”

Rose turned the cap over in her hands. Feeling the blades in its peak against her numb fingers.

“Dad’s?” Charlie managed to ask.

“Finn’s,” Rose smiled.

“Tha’s…” Her brother was drifting off.

“Charlie?”

Rose leaned over and shook his shoulder a little. He grunted a bit, but that was all.

“Charles.”

He was well and truly out of it. Rose looked up and down the deserted alley. She stuffed the cap into her coat pocket, got her hands around her brother’s chest and dragged him back across to the bins.

Carefully, she lowered him down next to the puddle of his own vomit, put his arms out by his sides, pinning them down with her knees as she sat down on his chest. She brushed his hair from his face, took the cap out of her pocket with her right hand and gripped his chin with her left.

Charlie grunted when the blades first touched his right eye, but he didn’t start screaming and thrashing until Rose was really leaning into it. His left eye was wide open, darting around in panic, but there was no telling whether he knew what was happening exactly.

Rose dropped the cap and punched him in the face hard enough to knock him out.

With shaking hands, Rose retrieved the cap, laid it in the centre of her brother’s chest, got up and started running up the alley towards the street.

“Help,” she screamed. “Please…they’ve cut him…help us!”

By the time a handful of drunk soldiers-to-be had stumbled into the alley there was no much blood and confusion, no one noticed Rose slipping away and disappearing into the homeward bound stragglers.

#

Her father was looking at her from the other side of the hospital bed. Charlie, in between them, was out cold, dosed with enough pain medicine to make him sleep til Christmas.

Someone’d been in earlier to sign off on the papers declaring her brother unfit for service on grounds of impaired vision. You couldn’t very well be expected to shoot at someone if you couldn’t see them coming.

Rose was holding Charlie’s hand and Tommy’s stare, feeling as if she might float if she let go of either.

“D’you have anything to tell me?” her father asked finally.

“Yea,” Rose nodded towards her bag, hanging off the end of the bed. “There’s a request form in there for additional coal allowance.”

Her father didn’t take his eyes off her.

“The manor gets bloody freezing,” Rose said. “Rubes’ll catch her death.”

“Can’t have that,” Tommy said after a while. “Got to look after our own.”

Rose rubbed her fingers gently over Charlie’s knuckles.

“Yea,” she said, “we do.”

**Author's Note:**

> *BEF - British Expeditionary Force  
> *NCC - National Camps Corporation (or, according to Rose, Numpty Clueless Cunts)


End file.
